Thirty-Years Ago this week in Ohio State Football – Ohio State Buckeyes
10/14/1998 12:00:00 AM | Football
October 14, 1998
COLUMBUS, Ohio –
Ohio State ’68
%^$All the Way to the Top
%^$Ohio State 13, Purdue 0
%^$Oct. 12, 1968
%^$by Steve Greenberg and Larry Zelina
%^$“Ohio State ’68: All the Way to the Top” will be released in mid-September. Reserve your copy now by calling 1-800-327-5557.
%^$Coach Woody Hayes had the No. 1-ranked Boilermakers in his sights since his team had suffered that humiliating 41-6 thrashing in Columbus the previous season. He made no bones about it, either; Purdue was going down one way or another.
%^$Before a then-record Ohio Stadium crowd of 84,834, the top-rated Boilermaker Express was more than derailed by No. 5 OSU; it nearly was humiliated by the Buckeyes, who featured nine sophomore starters and five more who played significant minutes.
%^$Purdue entered the game averaging more than 40 points a game with All-America quarterback Mike Phipps (“No. 15”-remember Woody’s letter?) and Heisman Trophy front-runner Leroy Keyes, a versatile two-way performer at halfback and cornerback. All Purdue got for its notoriety and efforts: 186 total yards. Keyes contributed 19 rushing yards on seven carries and had four receptions for 44 yards. Bye, bye No. 1. Bye, bye Heisman.
%^$”I think Woody out-coached me,” Purdue Coach Jack Mollenkopf said. “… They were higher emotionally than we were.”
%^$To be sure, Hayes had his players primed.
%^$After a scoreless first half-Purdue’s lone first-half shutout in twenty-eight games and one during which OSU repeatedly cost itself scoring chances by missing three field-goal attempts and committing fumbles and penalties-the game literally was decided in the third quarter, when Buckeyes safety Ted Provost stepped in front of a Phipps pass in the flat, picked it off and raced 34 yards southward down the sun-splashed west sideline.
%^$”I was scared of those ‘flat’ passes,” Mollenkopf said. “We hadn’t thrown long (by that point in the game). Maybe if we had, we could have kept (Provost) back there.”
%^$This game was iced by quarterback Bill Long’s 14-yard scoring run, one many still consider to be the most crucial in OSU’s vaunted history. Playing in place of Rex Kern, who became sidelined with an injured wrist only one play before, Long dropped back to pass but spotted a lane up the middle. He pulled the ball down, tucked it away and headed for the goal line, meeting up with a pair of Boilermakers defenders at the 2-yard line and dragging them into the end zone.
%^$The Buckeyes’ offense was absolutely relentless, pounding away at the supposedly superior Boilermakers’ defense for 333 total yards. “I knew we could run against them,” Hayes said.
%^$Fullback Jim Otis led the way with 29 carries for 144 yards, halfback John Brockington had 10 carries for 69 yards, quarterback Rex Kern had 11 carries for 45 yards and halfback Dave Brungard had 10 carries for 41 yards. There was no answer readily available from across the field.
%^$”The four coaches and the starters, they did it,” Hayes said. “I don’t coach defense at all anymore. … Jack Tatum covered Keyes so well. Tatum just has great quickness and the ability to recover.”
%^$Phipps struggled to a 10-of-28, 120-yard outing and had a second interception, this time by middle guard Jim Stillwagon, who stepped in front of a short toss at the Boilermakers’ 26-yard line. Five plays later, Long’s TD all but slammed the door on any hopes for a Purdue victory.
%^$Said Hayes: “(Phipps) has said he can read his patterns better this year. Well, our kids didn’t give him much time to read. He was on the seat of his pants quite often.”
%^$Perhaps an alert fourth-quarter play by linebacker Doug Adams was all the insurance OSU needed. With fourth-and-goal at the OSU 7-yard line, Adams tipped a pass intended for Keyes. The ball continued its path toward the intended receiver, but cornerback Tim Anderson was there to make certain Keyes had no chance at it.
%^$”Let me say this without equivocation: That was the greatest defensive effort I have ever, ever seen,” Hayes said. “It was unbelievable what they did to a great football team. I take nothing away from Purdue. Study their movies and you can see what they can do with the football. I just can’t believe the job our defense did. … I can’t remember a greater victory. No defensive effort ever came close to this. … Purdue had first-and-goal at our 7-yard line and ended up on the 7-yard line. That’s great defense.”
%^$
%^$Purdue 0 0 0 0 – 0%^$Ohio State 0 0 0 13 – 13
%^$OSU – Provost, 34-yard interception return (kick failed).%^$OSU – Long, 14-yard run (Roman kick).%^$Attendance – 84,834
%^$ PUR OSU%^$First downs 16 22%^$Rushing 35-57 67-333%^$Passing 2-34-129-2 8-16-78-0%^$Total yards 186 411%^$Punts-avg. 6-36 4-31.2%^$Punt returns 1-6 3-17%^$Kickoff returns 3-5 1-13%^$Int. returns 0-0 2-35%^$Fumbles-lost 2-0 3-2%^$Penalties-yards 4-43 8-96
%^$
The post-game huddle
%^$Tatum: I think for that game we had a great game plan because the things that Purdue did, they weren’t very complicated but they did them very well. And when Keyes was in the backfield, they were going to run the toss sweep. When he was in the backfield, I kind of moved in and either blitzed or made sure they didn’t get around the outside on the run. When Keyes split out I just covered him man on man. I think cutting off the running game was the big deal. That’s what we had to do. We couldn’t let him get into a rhythm in that running game.
%^$Otis: You know, you look back, we made … here is how I recall this game. We really played a much better game against Purdue. I don’t know what we were rated but we were in the Top Ten someplace and they were No. 1. But, we really outplayed these guys. I mean, we made a lot of mistakes … we made mistakes in our first three games. It wasn’t until we played Northwestern, who was kind of a mediocre Big Ten team, that we just dominated there. … The defense probably played a better game-mistake free-than we did because we were making silly mistakes that you do on offense when you’re not as disciplined as you need to be.
%^$Zelina: Well, in the first quarter … the first and second quarters when we kept driving down to their end of the field, we had a holding penalty. I looked at the highlight film and there were three big plays that we made in a row that were called back because of penalties and we wound up with nothing.
%^$Otis: Yeah.
%^$Zelina: And despite that, the defense … whoa, what a game that was, boy!
%^$Otis: You know? They were great players.
%^$Foley: The play, to be real honest with you, was Billy Long’s play. That actually put the whole season into perspective, because, again, you got a guy coming in cold turkey and he puts the other points on the board. I’d say that kinda set the stage for the whole season.
%^$Nick Roman: Was that third down, Bill?
%^$Long: Yeah.
%^$Zelina: Can you talk about it?
%^$Long: Woody called a hitch pass to Jan White. It was the 99-Hitch. I remember going back (in the pocket) and seeing the linebacker, in my first three steps, sitting on Jan, and I knew it was not going to work. … So I thought, I’m in trouble here. And then it was like a truck went through there; the line opened up. The defensive back was in the end zone, and he stayed in the end zone. I went right to his feet.
%^$Zelina: It was like slow motion getting there, wasn’t it?
%^$Long: Yeah, well …
%^$Marsh: Look, there’s Billy with his high-tops on.
%^$Long: It felt like it took forever, but it didn’t. But the significant thing was that we were only up 6-0 before that play.
%^$Zelina: That was the turning point. … Man, I remember how intense it was that week. The coaching staff was just absolutely freaking intense!
%^$Long: And they didn’t want us to peak too early. By Monday we were sky high!
%^$Foley: And I’ll tell you something else that’s worth mentioning as far as offensive innovation, and this goes back to what they did on defense. The whole time, from when we got beat the year before, Woody decided that their defensive line was not in shape. We were going to run the entire game with no huddle. And, really, I think it’s the first time where we had hand signals and communication with wideouts. I mean, it’s almost like what they’re doing today. It was incredible. On the first drive we went right down the field. The first part was that Woody decided we’d run the no-huddle, but we had to be in shape. So, we had to sprint every single day. …
%^$Zelina: Do you remember how big that defense was? Their smallest guy on the defensive line was like 250, which was huge back then. But Woody thought that with this no-huddle, they’d get tired, they’d get tired, they’d get tired. But …
%^$Long: I think it set a different tone.
%^$Foley: The whole stadium was astounded. It was like silence, almost. Even though we were moving the ball, and everything was wide-open and different, the crowd was just, like, watching us as if to say, “Is this really Ohio State football?”
%^$Marsh: Who the heck are these guys?
%^$Polaski: This was a game that was obviously a high priority for us from the beginning of the season, and because of the defeat the previous year. We were prepared. When they came out in a formation, we knew what Purdue was going to do out of that formation. There was nothing they were gonna do to us that we weren’t prepared for. And the play Teddy Provost intercepted a pass on, we just switched … we knew where the two receivers were going to be. We just gave (Phipps) a bad read. He thought the guy was going to be wide open, and Teddy Provost was all over it. Now, to Teddy’s credit, he knew that it was coming and this was an easy pass to drop …
%^$Zelina: That’s the toughest catch to make …
%^$Polaski: Yeah. This was the easy pass to drop. Teddy wrapped it up. If he had a better arm, he could have cleared the south end zone stands.
%^$Zelina: Didn’t Holtz come up with a scheme?
%^$Tatum: He came up with a thing they called “The Robber.” It was a game between me and Teddy Provost. When I called “Robber” I would take the deep curl zone and Teddy would shoot up and take the short zone. Ordinarily, it was the other way. I guess the best thing that happened was early in the game we had a regular defense called and I went out and got my hands on a pass in the short flat and almost intercepted it. The next time they came that way we called “Robber” and I guess Phipps read me and just flung it out there and Teddy walked in with it.
%^$Zelina: We were well prepared.
%^$Marsh: That’s the first game where I remember all this stuff in the locker room, with Leroy Keyes, Mike Phipps and all that …
%^$Polaski: Leroy Keyes and Phipps’ jerseys were 23 and 15, and they were on the ground. And when you walked out to practice, you could walk on it, step on it, spit on it, do whatever you wanted to it. They were two people we were not going to let beat us. And, we didn’t “talk” to them.
%^$Zelina: We weren’t a talking team.
%^$Polaski: Yeah. To this day, I can remember telling Jerry Levias in the SMU game, “Nice catch.”
%^$Nick Roman: Hmmmmm.
%^$Polaski: It was! Believe me. I was all over his little butt and he still caught it. There wasn’t any talking. The other guy was allowed to be a good athlete. They were allowed to make plays. Our job was to make sure they didn’t, and in this game they sure didn’t!
%^$Nick Roman: What the Old Man always told us was that if we were taunted, point up to the scoreboard.
%^$Zelina: It was an unbelievable, hard-hitting game. The score indicated that, and we only scored one touchdown offensively. And I’ll tell you, that guy that just walked out of here (Foley had excused himself), he had, every game, this ugly scar on his nose. And he hit so hard he had blood just running down his face.
%^$Marsh: All the time.
%^$Zelina: And I remember Duke and Rufus and Muhlbach. And Muhlbach was blocking a 250-pound guy at 195 pounds, and just, and just, well, it was a war. It was a war!
%^$Worden: We were a better team than they were.
%^$Polaski: That game was a defining moment and it made us a better team. They were No. 1 and averaging 40 points a ball game coming to us, and we shut them out.
%^$Long: Did you know that before that game we weren’t selling out the stadium?
%^$Marsh: I’ll tell you, Purdue was a cocky team.
%^$Nick Roman: They were.
%^$Worden: They were confident.
%^$Zelina: I could see it in pre-game (warm-ups), they were starting to strut.
%^$Nick Roman: I was hurt and did not get a chance to play against the suckers! But the next year, I did. I was having fun that day. I did the talking that day.
%^$Marsh: You’ve got a way with words, Nick.
%^$Long: To shut out this team was impossible. Nearly impossible.
%^$Tatum: There was a handful of unsung heroes on that defensive unit. Schmidlin, Nielsen, Urbanik. They were solid. Like I said, once we cut off the sweep, they had a pretty good fullback. And a lot of times they set up Keyes on the outside and would try to pop that fullback up the middle. They just shut off everything up the middle and they forced Purdue to try to run outside and they just couldn’t. Those guys were just rock-solid. They were there all the time. … I’ll tell you another guy, my favorite guy, Dave Whitfield. He made me an All-American. He played wide side with me. He took all the blocking out and all I had to do was make the tackle. It was funny, you know, because they would pull two guards and send a back out and he’d take all three out and I’d make the tackle. If something happened and the back got out on me, we’d go back to the huddle and I’d bitch at him: “C’mon, Whit, you let the back get out on me.” He was great, he was great.
%^$Polaski: The crowd enthusiasm came back that day, too. It was one of those days I can remember the crowd in Ohio Stadium.
%^$Nick Roman: They took the goal posts down.
%^$Worden: Yeah, that was something.
%^$Polaski: Most of the time, once the game started, you didn’t hear anything when you were on the field. There was an electricity that was there that day …
%^$Long: I was at the 1970 Michigan game, the 1977 Oklahoma game … I’ve never seen a crowd like the one for this game.
%^$Strickland: And then 84,000 people moved down to High Street! It was one freaking party, man!
%^$Nick Roman: I thought they were going to beat us.
%^$Long: I thought they were going to score against us.
%^$Worden: The thing I remember, I was looking at Woody-I was on the sideline-and he caught me eye, and I said, “We got ’em, Coach.”
%^$Nick Roman: Our coaches were something! The stuff that happened in the (1997) Penn State game wouldn’t have happened on our teams. No way. Those guys were twelve-up and started celebrating, and then Penn State comes back and kicks their butts. You would never see us smiling …
%^$Polaski: No. 1 …
%^$Nick Roman: When somebody was down and we had our foot on their throat, we pushed harder on it.
%^$Zelina: Especially after Billy’s touchdown, it wasn’t a letdown; it became more intense at that point. It may not have been our biggest victory, but it was our most important.
%^$Polaski: When you start talking about celebrating and all that stuff, when you came off the field you had a spot you were supposed to be. Offensively, they had seats. Defensively, they had seats. If you weren’t there, somebody wanted to know why. If information was going to be passed on, you had to be there-not up celebrating when the game’s still going on! If your (position) coach wanted to come to you and talk to you, your butt had better be there. There wasn’t any celebrating on the sideline back then, because when you came back to the sideline, you came back to be coached again.
%^$Zelina: As I remember, in the fourth quarter of this game, they had a couple of drives down to our 20-yard line … (Mike) Radtke had a sack and Wagon (Jim Stillwagon) made the interception. … They moved down there and it was scary in the fourth quarter.
%^$Polaski: They were never out of the ball game, especially with our kicking game. Two scores, and they win.
%^$Long: Coaches today talk about how you can’t win without a good kicking game. It’s so true. We just managed to do enough other things right.
%^$Zelina: I was an integral part of that awful kicking game!
%^$Worden: Our coaching staff was really into that football game, more than any other game. (Defensive coordinator) Lou McCullough was just in tears after the game.
%^$Marsh: It was that way all year.
%^$Zelina: We didn’t blow anybody, except Michigan, away.
%^$Nick Roman: We were a better team in 1969 and we lost to those guys. In 1968, we were finding ourselves.
%^$(Ted Provost enters the room.)
%^$Zelina: The Tree! The Tree Man!
%^$Nick Roman: We were just talking about you. Where the heck have you been?
%^$Provost: Coaching a basketball game.
%^$Marsh: We were talking about Purdue in 1968.
%^$Nick Roman: He kicked their fannies all by himself.
%^$Provost: It didn’t start with that game. It started the year before, when they beat us 41-6. You guys (sophomores) weren’t there. We were there. …
%^$Zelina: We were up in the stadium.
%^$Provost: Ski and I were there. We got humiliated in the secondary. They wiped us out. They could have scored sixty points if they wanted to. We started from there. Woody got us primed for this game starting back then. The electricity was unbelievable for this game. I drove my car down to campus for this game and …
%^$Zelina: Left it there?
%^$Provost: I left it there. The next day I said, “Where’s my car?”
%^$Zelina: Ski was talking about the play you scored on. Do you remember that?
%^$Provost: Yeah. We were covering two underneath, and we would switch it off. I think the play before I had covered the inside guy and Jack (Tatum) had the outside guy. Phipps read the play. He saw Jack covering the inside guy and he thought I was covering deep, but I was playing up. It was a no-brainer.
%^$Long: Of all people, Ted Provost, the quietest guy on the team, did the only real celebrating during the game. He throws the ball in the stands.
%^$Marsh: Otie (Jim Otis) copied him one game …
%^$Zelina: The Michigan game …
%^$Marsh: Just to prove he had as good of an arm.
%^$Long: No one did that. No one ever did that.
%^$Zelina: And you didn’t even get hollered at for that, did you?
%^$Provost: No. No, Holtz told us, “If we score on defense, you guys can do it.” (He turns to Polaski:) I think you did it on the blocked punt, right?
%^$Zelina: He spiked it!
%^$Polaski: I did spike it.
%^$Zelina: You defensive backs were hot dogs back there.
%^$Provost: Hey!
%^$Polaski: We had to take it when we had the opportunity.
%^$Provost: We had a lot of change-ups, and that was ninety percent of it right there.
%^$Zelina: Keyes was never the same after that ball game. Never the same. Phipps was never the same after that ball game, either.
%^$Otis: Do you remember, Larry, Woody always used to stand behind us when we were on offense and, you know, he seemed to spend a lot of time with the backs? One of those individual deals. That’s all he did.
%^$Zelina: He was the backfield coach, man. … We moved the ball but we had some penalties and turnovers in that game. We shot ourselves in the foot a couple of times.
%^$Otis: I do remember us having some penalties. We did run the ball effectively against them. And we needed the big plays against them. We needed the big play from Provost. And then the big play from Billy Long …
%^$Zelina: That really was the springboard to our season. It gave us an indication of what we could do.
%^$Otis: There’s no question, and the fact that we made mistakes in the first three games and got away with it. From that point on, when you beat the No. 1 team in the country … Do you remember the date of that game?
%^$Zelina: Yeah, I’ll never forget it. Only reason why was because it was my mom’s birthday. It was October 12.
%^$Otis: It was Columbus Day. Do you remember Woody made a speech to us about Columbus? Before the game he gave us a big talk about how Columbus discovered America. And I’m sure the juniors and seniors are taking it all in and the sophomores are looking at each other. But at halftime it might have been a little bit more meaningful. He said, “They’re No. 1 and we’re killing ourselves but we’re beating them.” And how all these kids across America would give their right arms just to be sitting in this room right now where we were. And we went out in the second half and have those two big plays that we talked about, but we took them apart in the second half. I don’t remember how Purdue did the rest of the season.
%^$Zelina: I know that Mike Phipps was never the same and Leroy Keyes was never the same after that game.
%^$Smith: What I remember is that Woody did a masterful job at halftime, and it wasn’t really him (talking). He brought in Lew Walt to the locker room …
%^$Nick Roman: He was the commandant of the (U.S. Marine) Corps, a four-star general.
%^$Smith: The commandant of the Marine Corps was in our locker room at halftime! And I’ll never forget him standing up and talking about or relating war in the trenches in Vietnam to playing ball and the challenge ahead of us that day. I had gotten word that a friend was killed in Vietnam about two or three weeks before that, a high school friend. And (Walt) was there and there wasn’t a dry eye in the locker room. I mean, we could have beaten the Green Bay Packers that day, I think, based on the motivation level. Woody was masterful in the way he planned that, and he knew the young and emotional talent he had on this team and how high we could get.
%^$Pollitt: The other thing about that game, well actually before that game, was we’d get taped down at the stadium. Normally there wasn’t much of a crowd (at that time of day) or noise at all when you’re getting taped. This game, when we were getting taped, it was loud outside, and it had to be an hour before game time. … That game you kind of realized in the back of your mind, Hey, this is a different deal. It was rockin’ out there.
%^$Jim Roman: When we went out for pre-game (warm-ups) at 12:10, they were all over the place already.
%^$White: Most definitely. It certainly was different from the other two games.
%^$Sensibaugh: Whoa!
%^$Nick Roman: In Ohio Stadium, (players) could stand up on the second floor of the locker room and see everything, and we were all going, “Man, this is happening. This is big.” We could look down at all the people coming in from the Polo Fields.
%^$Sensibaugh: It was a whole different atmosphere.
%^$Nick Roman: You could hear them!
%^$Polaski: The crowd was up for it, because the No. 1 team in the country was coming in.
%^$Sensibaugh: After this win, whether you read the stuff or believed the stuff they said about us, it was something else! We had just upset, basically …
%^$Jim Roman: Shut them out!
%^$Sensibaugh: We had just shut out the No. 1 team.
%^$Nick Roman: That was a serious butt-kicking!
%^$Sensibaugh: And we started to talk, “Maybe we do have something here, you know?”
%^$Polaski: But even after this game, it happened all the way through the season … Teams come out now from the beginning of the year wanting to attain the national championship.
%^$Pollitt: It wasn’t something we set out to do. It was something that happened to us because of what we did. … Am I correct on this? Leroy Keyes, on a punt, was the slot man then. And as I remember, there was a play set up where the middle guard and the end man were to hit Keyes and stand him up and Tatum had a 10-yard run and was gonna drill him.
%^$Smith: They take him out and say he had an equipment problem.
%^$Sensibaugh: He goes out, the sub comes in and gets drilled and that was the last time Keyes plays slot man on the punt.
%^$Nick Roman: We were gonna take a shot at him, I remember that.
%^$Polaski: We weren’t real worried about returns …
%^$Marsh: Lou McCullough didn’t care about whether you took a cheap shot.
%^$Nick Roman: It was win at all costs.
%^$Marsh: Lou McCullough said he wanted Keyes out, no matter what.
%^$Zelina: When I think about it, we played against some great football players that season.
%^$Otis: Oh, we did!
%^$Sensibaugh: The response of everybody this week was just so sharp …
%^$Tatum: At that point, though, I think we were still trying to figure out how good we were. We didn’t have a clue at that point. I don’t think we knew until the season was over. And that was probably good.
%^$Smith: Does anybody remember McCullough’s pre-game prayer when Woody let him do it? (Imitates McCullough’s southern accent:) “De-ah Low-ud, please help us to dee-stroy ow-uh en-ih-mee. Thank you very much.”
%^$Pollitt: Keep cool, baby, and run those fat tackles to death!
